Oracle Blog

(Masood Mortazavi)

JavaOne is better than ever

Given my impressions from the first day of JavaOne 2006, I believe JavaOne is now far better organized, more effective and with greater substance than the ones I ones I attended and spoke at in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002. Perhaps, the trouble was that in these other JavaOne's I was a speaker. When you're a speaker at JavaOne, you become a bit too focused on your own talk and forget that there are other things going on, too.

In any case, I can sense a very significant improvement, and it has to do, I think, with Sun's diligent work to collect and use feedback from the attendees, greater involvement of the engineers in the organizing and refereeing committees and a general raising of awareness regarding audience expectations. People like Sreeram Duvur, Bill Shannon, Graham Hamilton, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, and countless others, including excellent engineering teams such as Ludo Champenois, Jerome Dochez and Roberto Chinnici, who have contributed and paid a great deal of attention to details that make the conference a really useful one for developers.

On this first day, there was a very good reception of the Derby talk given by Dan Debrunner and David Van Couvering (May 16, 2006). People asked some good questions regarding XML support (the person raising this question was invited to join and contribute to the Apache / Derby community), the timing of recovery (does it happen at the time next connection is opened? earlier? later?), performance compared to other databases, etc. People seemed to be using Derby or thinking of it.

The Derby evening event put together by Sun and IBM, Tuesday night (May 16, 2006), was also well-attended. People seemed more interested in the conversations than in the food, which was also very good, or the drink. For our parts, it was a great opportunity for our visiting, Trondheim, Norway engineering team to meet and mingle with other Derby contributors.